Mapping the Body:

Anatomy Trains
for Yoga Practitioners
A Yoga U Online Course
with

Tom Myers
Transcript, Session 2

Eva Norlyk Smith: Hello, everybody. This is Eva Norlyk Smith with Yoga U Online.
Welcome to the second and last session of our two-part online course with Tom
Myers on Mapping the Body: Anatomy Trains for Yoga Practitioners. In our last
session, Tom looked at the deep and superficial front line and the back line and how
they apply to forward bends and back bends. In this session, Tom will continue to
discuss the myofascial meridians of the Anatomy Trains, this time focusing on the
lateral and spiral lines and how they relate to the practice of yoga asana,
particularly side bends and twists. Tom, welcome. Were so happy to have you back
with us.
Tom Myers: Thanks, Eva. Im glad to be back. And welcome everybody out there.
As Eva said, we are moving into side bends and twists, which means well be
moving into the lateral and spiral and a little bit into the functional lines. Along the
way, I hope to pick up some of the questions that we already had and welcome the
rest of them.
We are exploring Hatha Yoga as an exploration of a shape, how youre shaped
matters, and thats what yoga is trying to explore. Thats the kind of body work that
Ive been doing, structural body work or structural integration for all these forty
years. Im not a yoga teacher, but Im friend of yoga and I think Im a fellow
explorer in that kind of thing of what do you change. Thats what I think that the
folks who started Hatha yoga way back when were thinking about is, Can you
change the man? Can you change the person by changing the shape? I really think
you can, and fascia is a part of that. We started to talk about the fascia in terms of
the myofascial pathways of that Anatomy Trains plus a map of looking how one
muscle connected to the other through the fascial fabric and that those were
common pathways for transmitting stability from one part of the skeleton to the
other, and strain from one part of the skeleton across to the other.
Our responses really come in the neurological system, but Im talking about the
response of the fascial system will determine. Somebody was asking a little bit
about a slump.. When you go into a slump, you change the standing length of
both the muscles and eventually the fascia that are in these things. The fascia
doesnt change overnight. Its a kind of slow St. Bernard dog, but it will come along.
We have mostly been thinking about this in terms of muscles, and certainly the
evidence is that the body does not think in terms of muscles, as tempting as
muscles are as a way to think. Its really an accident of how we came into the body
with the scalpel. Thats what I mean by the European mistake of four hundred and
seventy years ago.

So we took the scalpel and when you go into the body with the scalpel, the muscle
is an easy thing to pull out. You carve away everything around it and you see
theres the biceps. Well, what would the biceps do if it was the only muscle in the
body? Well, it would supinate the forearm. Thats whats shown here. Of course, it
would flex the elbow and do some kind of weak diagonal flexion of the shoulder.
So we clapped our hands and say, Thats it. We know what our biceps is, and we
walk away from it. The trouble is that never does a muscle ever work alone. Thats
number one. Number two, the brain doesnt think in terms of those individual
muscles. The body parses up that way with a knife, but the brain might be thinking
about the biceps as a hundred different small muscles within this fascial envelope
but it doesnt turn on a whole muscle, generally. It turns on all the neuromotor units
within that, or it may turn on a few, or it may turn on some, or it may turn on this
with this kind of movement and that one with that kind of movement. The body is
much more thinking in terms of smaller units than big muscles. So Im sorry to do
this for all the anatomy that youve learned, but knowing the hamstrings is not
really understanding all the connections that happen around, east and west, and up
and down, north and south, from the hamstrings. And that has so much to do with
how the hamstrings react to stretches, to exercise, to daily life (sitting and the rest
of it).
Ive made an entire career out of taking the scalpel and turning it sideways and
looking in terms of the connection among the muscles, instead of dividing the
muscle itself. So there is a trapezius and it was taken off of the body at the very far
left there. It was taken off to the head, and the upper line, going all the way down
with the little tail in the upper right, that was taken off the spine in the usual way.
And the edges (what looks like the wing there) are taken off by blunt dissection.
You just lift it up with your fingers. But then, when we got to the end of the
trapezius, instead of cutting that line between it and the deltoid (I hope you
recognize that triangle as the deltoid), instead, I slipped the scalpel underneath and
cut along the bone. We didnt have to cut the bone. We didnt have to cut the cling
wrap, the plastic wrap, the saran wrap around the bone. We were able to keep a
fascial plane, a fascial sheet, from the trapezius to the deltoid, to the lateral
intermuscular septum, to all those muscles that run along the back of your arm.
So if you put your hand on the side of your neck and ran your hand down your
opposite arm all the way to the backs of your fingers, youd be going along this line.
Its the top of the wing. And instead of thinking about a muscle going from here to
there in terms of attachments, you can think about this in terms of the tracks and
stations. So the muscles are the tracks and these places where its tacked down

onto the bones are stations, but not a place where the fascia stops, not a place
where the transmission stops, not a place where the movement stops.
So instead of thinking of the body in terms of six hundred muscles, I think better
and more yogic, if I may say so, to think of one muscle in six hundred fascial
pockets. In this specimen on the right, the myofascialature has been removed from
the skeleton. Thats actually the skeleton that was inside those muscles. But the
muscles had been taken off and then reassembled into the whole muscular organ.
You then see how the muscles and the fascia together (the so-called myofascia) are
pulling in on the skeleton and the skeleton is pushing out against it. We create that
general balance which we then modulate with the nervous system thats stuck in
that skull there and that comes out, all the muscles modulate the tension. But you
dont really stabilize your body by thinking about a muscle and then contracting it.
Its much more of a very, very tight interaction between the muscles, the fascia,
and the reporting that youre getting back to the nervous system.
I also mentioned thinking about the body as a tensegrity. Heres a model of a
tensegrity person done by Tom Flemons out in Salt Spring Island off Vancouver. He
just makes the most amazing models. So you can see how, if you were to take one
of these models into where the rubber bands are holding the sticks together, the
sticks arent stuck together except in a few places. This is, of course, just a very
simple model of something as complex as a human being, but it gives you the idea
of what it would be like to see the body where the sticks are floating in the rubber
bands. The sticks are floating in the balance of the rubber bands. And of course, Im
egotistical enough to think that the Anatomy Trains form those kinds of rubber
bands, those long strings of elastic material that go around the skeleton and hold it
in place. Thats just another way of thinking about the musculoskeletal system. Im
sort of going against muscles these days but you can take it back if you want, but
the individual muscle idea, I dont think will survive.
As we change our biomechanics A lot of the biomechanics that youve heard thats
been applied to yoga up until now has been Newtonian lever, fulcrum, if I bend
forward my sit bones are going up therefore Im stretching my hamstrings against
the back of my knee and what position should my knee be These are ways of
thinking about the body that its kind of like a Newtonian mechanics, kind of like a
car or a set of levers and fulcrums. The new biomechanics is going to think more
holistically in terms of springs and responses and different vectors I dont want to
go too far off into that.

Last time, we looked into the superficial back line. Heres a diagram and a dissection
of the superficial back line placed over a skeleton just so you know this isnt a
figment of my imagination. Its actually dissectible in the body. And one of the
questions I wanted to deal with is the superficial back line looks strangely like the
gall bladder meridian, doesnt it? I do know there are correspondences between the
Anatomy Trains lines and the acupuncture lines. I have to tell you I know very little
about the acupuncture lines per se and I didnt create the Anatomy Trains out of
looking at the oriental system, the Asian system, and recreating it in the myofascia.
This came out of my work in anatomy. Anatomy Trains came about from my
attempt to create a game to teach my students connected anatomy. Dr. Peter
Dorsher whos a TCM practitioner, wrote an article and I put that article in the back
of the second edition of the books. If you go there and see the correspondences,
the deep front arm line is very like the lung meridian, and the deep front line is the
kidney meridian. There are things that are different, though, as well see in a little
bit.
We looked also last time at the superficial front line, going up the front of the body.
We looked a little bit (although this could be the subject of a several webinars just
by itself) at the deep front line, what I call the core. I know people have different
definitions of core, but this continuous myofascia all the way from the inner ankle
up to the tongue and jaw, including the diaphragm and the pelvic floor (although
thats not in this specimen), would be what I would call the core. Because
essentially, if you put an apple core at the top of your head and took the core all
the way down to your ankle, that would be more or less what you would include.
Anyway, well have to go into that deeper at another time because we want to get
on to the subject of this one.
The thing that we were doing by looking at the plains of the fascia, of the back line
which in this case, just wanted to give you a sort of common posture that you see
all the time. In this case, this fellows superficial back line has been pulled up as
indicated by the arrow in the back. The superficial front line, as you can see, is
falling down. The front of his hips are down. The front of his legs are tight. The
chest is pulled down. If I kept his head in there, youd see his head pulled down
and forward and resultant that his deep front line is also collapsing down in the
middle in the front of his spine.
I was urging you to think and look in terms of you looking at your students. Whats
happened to the sheets of fascia, not what muscle is responsible for this? Does this
guy have a tight rectus abdominus pulling down on his chest? Actually, he doesnt.

He has a weak rectus abdominus and seems to have weakness in the back. If youre
looking at him as a yoga teacher, if Im looking at him as a body worker, Im seeing
the need for tone in some places and less tone in other places in order for him to
breathe, in order for him to get his ribcage on top of his pelvis, in order for him to
lengthen his lower ribs away from the back of the pelvis All three of these lines
would be engaged. Then we looked a little bit at the kinds of poses that stretch the
front and back lines. In other words, stretching the saggital plane, forward bends
and back bends.
Now we want to look at the lateral aspect of the body the sides and then the
things that go across. First, well look at the lateral line along the lateral aspect of
the body. I want to go a little bit more closely into the anatomy this time of the
lines. We didnt much last time.
Here, you see the lateral line depicted as a set of muscles on the skeleton and then
as a set of lines on the side of the body. Id like you to notice that it looks like the
letter Y in the leg. Im looking at the one on the right. I guess thats true of the one
on the left, too. It looks like a Y in the leg and then it goes crisscross, crisscross up
the ribs and then one final crisscross at the neck. Thats the way the myofascia gets
arrayed along the side of the body almost like an accordion or almost like lacing.
Lets go look at that anatomy a little bit closer. You dont see the lateral lines so
much when youre just looking at the body. If I looked at this, youd say, Well,
what about all those shoulder muscles? Then I would say the shoulder is overlaid
over the top of the lateral line. If you take your right hand up your left ribs, youll
collide with the shoulder muscles in the armpit. But the lateral line is going under
those muscles and reemerges in the neck. So youd almost have to take your
shoulder off and look at the fish body to see the shoulder with all its muscles, to see
the fish body underneath the lateral line. It weaves together. The lateral line
weaves together the shoulder and the hip on the same side. Were going to go to
the spiral line next and that will weave together the shoulder and the hip on the
opposite side. But the lateral line is right straight down the line. So the shoulder
kind of ties onto it there, connecting the shoulder and the hip, connecting the ribs
and the hip. In other words, it kind of laces up the front and the back lines that we
did before. You can almost see it like the laces in your sneakers, going up from the
hip to the shoulder.
If you take all those Xs together, all those lacings together, the external and the
internal oblique, if you just grabbed the side of your waist (or in my case, whats

left of the waist), youll feel the internal and external oblique. Youll be able to pluck
them with your fingers like a guitar string. You wont be able to get the next one
which are the intercostals because theyre between the ribs. You can stick your
fingers between your ribs, but youll just be able to feel the outside of those
muscles. Those muscles are active and walking and breathing in my opinion but in
any case, they all together. If you took them all together, theyre going to make a
line from the hip up to the neck.
So the lateral line will be active, obviously, when youre doing the side bends. If you
see a difference in the side bends, we looked a little bit at that last time in the body
reading part, youre going to see a lateral bend in the spine or a lateral bend in the
body where one shoulder is closer to the hip than the other. This line, this lateral
line going all the way up the side of the body in human movement, is much more
concerned with stability. This is the stability that you use, this outer line stability.
Youll get a lot more out of it when you put your legs in a wide pose, right. So if
youre doing a balancing pose, if you keep your legs and feet together. If youre
going to be on one foot, if youre going to do a big standing pose, you put your legs
in a wide stance. That allows you to use this outer stability system of your lateral
line.
If you watch somebody riding a horse for the first time or a kid riding a bike for the
first time, youll see theyre using this outer lateral stability system a lot. Once
youve been on the horse for a while, once youve been on the bike for a while, your
stability system goes into that deep front line that we looked at before that goes
down the inside of the leg, the inseam of the leg to the inner arch. I just say this
because people, when they first get into a yoga class, theyre going to be getting
their stability a lot from this outer line. Its only when they get familiar with the
poses that theyre going to be able to gain their stability from the inner line. So
theres a progression in how theyre going to do that.
Heres a dissection of the lateral line all the way from the outer edge of the arch, all
the way up to the ear. It goes from ankle to ear along the outside. Lets look at it a
little more closely. In the leg part here, it starts from the bottom of the foot.
Interestingly, it reaches to the inside of the foot. So if you put your finger at the
base of your big toe and slide up a couple of inches along that next bone that
comes up from your big toe, youll come to the attachment of peroneus longus or
fibularis longus. Im not going to go too heavy on the names tonight, but youll be
reaching down to the inside of your foot to touch on the big toe side. And thats
kind of the funny thing, that the lateral line starts on the medial side of the foot
where that big tendon comes in.

Then theres another little tendon running, peroneus brevis or fibularis brevis as its
now called, that attaches to the sticky-outie bit thats down from your little toe. So it
grabs to the base of your big toe. Actually, not the base, but the base of the next
bone up, the metatarsal, and to the base of the fifth metatarsal, which, if you slide
your fingers down the outside edge of your foot, youll come right to that stickyoutie bone about halfway down the foot.
So those two muscles are starting from there. As you can see, they support what
the dancers would call the heel foot over the outside arch, the calcaneus, going
into the cuboid, going into the fourth and fifth metatarsals. Both of these muscles
come along the outside of that lateral arch. You can see them going behind the
malleolus, which is the sticky-outie bit at the ankle, and they have a retinaculum to
hold them down there, hopefully. Some people can way overstretch that
retinaculum if they get involved in an accident or something.
So you see those two muscles coming around the ankle and then going up the
outside edge of the leg. You can feel that on the outside edge of your leg. Its not
as far back as the soleus. The soleus and the gastrocnemius are softer. The
peroneal muscles that go right up the side are tougher. You can see that fascial
tendon coming down, right down the outside of the leg. So if you follow that up,
you can kind of strum it like a guitar string. As you move up, youll be going on
those two orange muscles on the outside, going up the outside of the leg. So its
sticking right to the fibula there. Theyre both stuck to the fibula. As you follow your
fingers up towards your knee, youll get to that little bone on the outside of the
knee. So thats the upper part of the fibula. So these fibularis muscles are going
right along the fibula. And if you go up to the head of the fibula, youre just below
the knee. And Im sorry, its called the iliotibial track but it also attaches to the
fibula, as well. So theres a spread of fascia, a smear of fascia down from the
iliotibial track which is that bluish thing that you see coming down the middle of the
outside of the leg there. And then, that crosses over on to that fibular head. You
have a very strong ligament underneath going across there, too.
If we came up the iliotibial band, youd get up to the hip. This is where it spreads
out into the Y. We just had to look at the deltoid of the shoulder a little bit ago, and
now, were looking at the deltoid of the hips. So if you put your hands on your
waist, as if you were about to reprimand your child, and you feel those muscles just
below the iliac crest there, these are the muscles that are forming the deltoid of the
hip the gluteus in the back, gluteus medius in the center, and tensor fasciae latae
in the front. All three of these muscles go into that big blue fascial sheet and that

big blue fascial sheet goes all the way down to your knee. Fom that top of the letter
Y which were seeing towards the bottom of this picture, you have the X, X, X, X, X,
X, X, X, with the obliques in the belly, the intercostals in the ribs just crossing back
and forth over each other, and then the sternocleidomastoid and the splenius
capitis. Im not going into this anatomy very much, but I just want you to see the
Xs that are going across.
So it does act like a Chinese finger puzzle or an accordion or Chinese finger puzzle
will be the closest. So that when I stretch away from those muscles that youre
looking at now when I stretch away from those ribs, those Xs are going to
become The legs of those Xs (all of them) will become more and more vertical
and then more and more tight. And they put a soft stop on your motion to the side.
Everybodys spine can go somewhat to the side. Some people dont go very much.
Sometimes theyre being held in the back muscles. Sometimes theyre being held in
these muscles out on the outer edge of those ribs. Well see that when we get to
the body reading part.
Up in the neck, the last X that you get should be the sternocleidomastoid and the
splenius. But what youre seeing here is the way so many people do it incorrectly,
which is they get the leading edge of the trapezius Like this fellow here with his
head forward posture, you see how far forward his ear is from his shoulder That
means he has to work very hard with both the upper part of his trapezius (and
anybodys whos had a massage knows how many trigger parts there are in the
upper part of the trapezius, that part that just curls over the side of the shoulder
there) and the levator scapulae (which if you got a massage again, you know how
much tension is right at the top of the apex of the scapulae). Everybody says, Oh, I
have stress, I take in my shoulders. But its not really so much the shoulders thats
the problem. Its the head being forward thats the problem.
Now, one of the best things you can do as a yoga teacher is to help people get their
head up on top of their body. Youre talking about somewhere between eight for a
child and twelve pounds (sometimes even more) for an adult head. And when you
put that forward of the line of gravity or the centerline of the body, youre putting
strain particularly on those two muscles but all the way down the back. You see
how far he has to hold his elbows back to get the head forward. Now, I dont know
whether the elbows came back first and the head came forward. I took this
photograph, and this guy was sufficiently belligerent, you can see that attitude in
his body.

Going on with the lateral line because I want to get into yoga, the lateral line is
equal on both sides. The front and the back line are on either side of the spine but
theyre not the same at all. The back muscles are not the same as your front
muscles. And on the lateral line, thats not true. The muscles are more or less the
same on both sides. The organs are a little bit different. But if youre talking about
the musculoskeletal system, youve got a more or less symmetrical set of muscles
on one side and the other, except very few people actually use it symmetrically, as
well see.
I just want to put another little piece of anatomy in here before we go on to the
posing part of this. And that is the connection from the quadratus lumborum up to
the neck. If we took the lateral line off, if we took all those muscles off (the
intercostals and the external obliques on the outside and those outer muscles on
the neck that I was talking about), if we took those away, we would see the inner,
real guy wires of the ribcage. And thats the scalenes on top. And if you strum the
side of your neck, you will feel real guitar strings on the side of your neck. Dont
strum too hard, too far down because in that little gap that you see between those
two guy wires at the top there, above the ribcage on the neck, that little gap is
where the nerves come out so that you can get brachial plexus pain if you press too
hard there. But its a good thing to feel just how tight those strings are. And they
should be tight. Theyre not supposed to be They certainly could be less tight than
they are in most people, but I dont think youll ever get them to be like the muscles
of the outer body.
And you can see that they are holding that ribcage up off the diaphragm that you
can see in the middle of the ribcage because in this picture, we can see into the
middle of the ribcage. Then you can see how the quadratus lumborum forms a root
for the diaphragm and a root for the ribcage to hold it down to the pelvis. Now we
dont want it to pull too far down into the pelvis, but we do want the diaphragm to
be rooted and the ribcage to be rooted so that breath can move in those two
directions from the middle of the diaphragm (that white little part of the
diaphragm in the middle) down to the hip via the quadratus lumborum, and then
above the lung from the scalenes up to the neck, you can draw the lungs apart
from each other and create a nice, easy breath.
Last thing about the lateral line is its interesting nature in the psychology. Just look
at the Sunday supplements and see how many of the fashion models are showing
you their clothes from the side. Because if you turn and face somebody, thats a
way of saying yes. If you turn your back to somebody, thats a way of saying no.

But the side of the body is a maybe. Interesting. I dont want to make too much of
it but its just an interesting psychological thing, the one that my teachers pointed
out to me and Ive been interested in ever since and it absolutely is true. Very few
clothes are modeled straight on or straight back.
Now, lets get into the lines and I actually was looking at this just before I came on
for the webinar and thinking about Id like to change the words at the bottom
because these are asanas that engage lateral line mobility and stability. I was
looking at these poses which are taken from my book. Im not at all vouching for
the accuracy of any of these poses, but you could see that once you start doing
these side bends, person A there is stretching their left lateral line, especially the
upper part, and contracting the right one, or at least its passively shortening, its
not actively contracting. And on the person B, you can really tell a lot about the
lateral lines in this pose (whose name, I dont know) because if theyre sagging
this guys sagging just a little bit in his hips thats a lack of strength in the
underlying lateral line and really nice the way it engages You know, if you do that
on both sides here, certainly engaging the lateral line in that stability fashion which,
in human movement is how its used more. We dont bob from side to side that
much when we walk. We want adaptability in that lateral line but we also want good
stability because we dont want our knees to pop out, or our hips to pop out, or our
ankles to pop out, or the ribs to move too much from side to side.
Other lines that can engage the lateral line as more of a stabilizing line, are any of
the poses that require balance because youll use that stability system of the lateral
line on the other side to keep your balance. Its fun, next time youre in Tree Pose
or a headstand, to pay attention not just to the front and back Now, youre doing
a lot of adjusting of the front and back when youre in these poses to keep your
balance. But whats usually keeping the balance pretty well so you dont pay as
much attention to it because its not requiring your attention, is the side to side
balance in these poses. So if you take some time to pay attention down from your
ears to your shoulders to your outer ribs to your outer hips to your outer knees to
your outer ankle, what we just traced anatomically the lateral line, then you begin
to feel what kind of role its playing in keeping you calm and keeping you steady.
Id like to go into what is for me a very complicated pose. I think it comes quite
early in yoga classes and yoga learning. But to my mind, as an anatomist, its a
very, very complex pose that involves a lot of things and a lot of lines in it. And lets
go look at that. Youll see a lot of different ways of doing this pose, and clearly, this
pose is asking where am I allowed to bend in the lateral line? It also, as we will see
because well have to come back to this pose, is a spiral line and a deep front line
pose at the same time, which is, for me, what makes it so complex.

But just looking at the lateral line on a couple of these people here, you can see
that where her hand is on her leg, if you trace that back, its not that her ribcage is
unwilling to bend, its that between her hip and the ribcage and between the hip
and the left femur, her left thigh bone, thats whats reluctant to allow her to come
down. What will be interesting when we look further is that her right hip has got to
change first before she will be able to get that length out of her left side. Lets just
see a few more of these. We can come back to some of these.
So heres somebody whos not having that problem. She achieves where shes going
with a bit more twist though, doesnt she? She has her hand on the floor and turned
backwards. Interestingly, I didnt know that that was part of triangle pose. But you
can see that her chest is turned more towards the floor. If we were to come back
here, the chest is not twisted so much. Here, the chest is twisted. And so, I would
see a limitation in the spiral line here. So well come back to this when we talk
about the spiral line but not, obviously, much trouble with letting the lateral line go.
In fact, the neck is turning back up again, the ribcage is so far down. But it would
be interesting. I would put my hands on this womans ribs and help her to turn her
breastbone towards the ceiling. I think thats where her pose would be going next.
But Im not yoga teacher. You can take all this with salt, anything that I say, and do
your own cuing. Im just trying to get the eyes going here.
This woman, however, the ribcage is turning fine even though the ribcage is not
facing towards the ceiling. Its not a problem in her ribcage. You can see a lot of
twists in her ribcage, but what you cant see further down is that her hips are not
able to turn so that shes not getting that lower lateral line. So between her right
ankle and her right hip, and you can see it in the knee as well, she cant let go of
that outer lateral line so the hip Instead of the chest being turned towards the
floor, the pubic bone is turned towards the floor and shes not really getting out
onto that lateral line. So instead of having her think about her eyes, or the positions
of her hands or anything like that, and loosen up on the ribcage but come down
into the pelvis would be what I would be telling this person. And if I were doing
hands-on work with her, I would be opening up that whole outside of the leg
between the iliac crest and the outer part of the ankle. So do you see the difference
between why this person cant face the ceiling with her chest, and why this person
cant face the ceiling with her chest. This one, its in the hips, and the other one, its
in the ability of the ribcage to turn itself.
Here, you got both. And by looking at us, she doesnt complete the pose in terms of

the neck. Maybe she didnt mean to. Im just using these photographs for what they
say. Please dont take this as judgmental. All these people are doing better than I
could do. But Im hoping just to tickle your eyes a little bit. If somebody came in
and this was the pose, Ill tell you this is the pose of somebody who grew a great
deal in one teenage year. Her limbs just sprouted out away from her and outgrew
her muscles, and yoga would be wonderful for her. I dont actually call this yoga,
what shes doing yet, but its a start. She really cant bend in the lateral line again,
between the ankle and the hip. So she gets a lot of bending through the waist but,
then not much through the upper part of the chest. Helping her regain the
proportion in her trunk would just really help. And its not an easy job. It takes
several months. Its probably more than we can talk about right now.
So we keep going and we see a winning smile and an outdoor setting. But we see
the limitation here in this womans right hip. This will get us into the deep front line.
I dont know what the condition of her lateral line is. Id have to see more
movement from her. But Ill tell you what is not happening is her right hip, the hip
that her hand is on the leg, is not settling back. Its held forward in the hip joint,
and without that ability to settle back in the hip joint, to settle down into that hip.
Whether shes free in her left lateral line or not doesnt matter because she cant get
there until that inside line of the leg. So where her thumb is on her leg, inner to that
would be the in-seam of the leg going from that right hip down to the right ankle.
And that inner deep front line is not allowing her to do this pose. She wont really
get into the pose, I dont think, until she gets that inner line of the leg done.
Id like to kind of summarize this with three photos here. This is a neophyte in
terms of the lines, doing a version of Trikonasana. What were seeing here is a
neophyte, a middling student, and a teacher all doing the same pose. So lets look
at this in terms of the lines. Heres this lateral line that you can see, this long bend
between his left ankle and his left ear. And you can see him having struggle with
that. When hes going to the right here, the right spiral line is being twisted. Do you
see why the looking up at the ceiling, which this guy isnt doing, is the completion of
that? The dotted lines are going behind his body all the way up to the back of his
neck. Well come back to the spiral line here in a minute, but you get the idea.
Theres a line spiraling around the body and this deep front line is the inner line of
the leg which is right near his thumb, too, same as the lady I was just talking about.
And this guys inside line, from his groin down to the inner arch is not really
allowing his hips to drop back, not really allowing him to use it. So what happens is
his lateral line, you see the thing here with his left side, is very long. And his right
side between the armpit and the hips is very short. So until he gets some of that

extension coming up through the core, spinal extension which well talk about when
we do the twists, he wont be able to progress so much in this.
Now this older gentleman has progressed on this, and he is looking more up
towards the ceiling. You can see that his lateral line is opening up somewhat, so
theres less disparateness between the right lateral line and the left lateral line in
the trunk. He is able to drop the hip back in the joint somewhat so that he can
make use of the deep front line. Therefore, his spiral line is looking more like its
getting towards the center and less stressed. But if we take this to his wife as it
happens, who is the yoga teacher at the studio that we took a photo. Again, Im
not in the position to argue with her or with you about the pose, but if I look at it in
terms of the lines, I see how much ease and length there is in the lateral line from
left ankle to left ear, how the spiral line is centered around the spine, and how the
right and left sides of the torso are so much closer to being the same as each other.
I hope this helps just a little bit just looking at the lines.
So well this into twists. Just putting the Triangle Pose up there one more time to
see how the spiral line acts as a twist. I dont know if you can see those green lines
on there, but thats the line thats being stretched. Thats the spiral line reaching
from the forward leg hip, around the upper ribs, around to the back side of the
head thats closer to the floor. So thats the line thats being stretched and the line
thats going (that line is not written on the picture there), but the line thats going
from As and Bs right hip, under the ribcage, and to the facial side of the head (the
side of the head thats facing up), that one is acting like a sling and is actually
holding him up. The spiral lines, when we get into these twists of which I think
Triangle Pose qualifies, then the one side of the spiral line is being stretched and
challenged. The other one is going to need to be able to contract to help support
the body and keep things balanced.
Lets look at the spiral line here. You can see that it wraps around the body across
the belly with the external and internal obliques crossing from one side of the ribs to
the other. Then it wraps around back and includes the shoulder blade in what I call
the rhomboserratus muscle and goes up to the hips. So its a double helix or two
parallel lines crossing each other between the shoulder blades in the back (which
you know people have a lot of trouble) and across the belly in the front (where you
know people have a lot of trouble with tonus) and then we have a kind of jump
rope that goes down from the hip, under the arch, and back up to the hip again.
Lets take this in a little more detail. The first part of the spiral line, the first part
thats going from the twist, from your eyes starting to move into the twist from your

head starting to move into the twist, are these splenii, meaning bandage (thats
what splenii means, like splint). So its the bandage muscle that comes down from
your head to your spine and your back. You can keep going with that muscle over
on to the opposite side to pick up the rhomboid muscles on the other side. The
rhomboids are of course the ones that hold your scapula up and in. If you keep
going on that, you get on the serratus anterior muscle. In fact, I dont want to
overwhelm you with anatomy here. I just want you to see this sweep down from
the right side of the head to the left rib including the edge of the shoulder blade
into it. And of course, thered be an equal and opposite one going down the other
side, except the trouble is they rarely are equal and opposite because most people
have a rotation of one kind or another, a preference of one kind or another.
Here you see what I call the rhomboserratus muscle, because its really one muscle
and it joins here from the spine where the rhomboids attach, over to the serratus
anterior, around to the ribs. So that a little inset picture that shows you how these
two muscles are connected and are holding that edge of the edge of the shoulder
blade against the spine. This line curls around from the serratus anterior to the
external oblique to the internal oblique. Its just a really nice sweep of myofascia. It
crosses over the rectus abdominus in the middle. But its pulling from the right side
of the ribs to the left side of the hips. You can see how any simple twist is going to
twist this. Almost everybody is not quite balanced in this. It seems to be pretty
universal in humans that we have a preference of a rotation in our spines to one
side or the other, and that will give a preference on one set of these muscles to one
side or the other.
So you can see a preference here. Now, this guy is doing it. He was an acrobat, and
he was brought in for an anatomical photograph and he grabbed a bamboo pole
and kinda twisted himself. Just look at his belly, and youll see that the rectus
abdominus has been pulled over and that there is a line of strain from his left ribs
across to his right hip. And you say, Oh, thats the one thats contracting. And
actually, no, its not. Its the other side thats contracting. Thats the side thats
being stretched, as his ribcage turns to his left, away from his pelvis. Hes stretching
his right spiral line, the one thats going from the right hip to the left ribs (I know
these rights and lefts get confusing), but just sort of draw an X on his belly and
youll see that the one thats going from the upper right to the lower left (your
upper right to your lower left) is longer, and the one that would be going from his
right ribs down to his left ribs would be shorter. So you see a fundamental
imbalance in the spiral line there. Most people have this, not quite as evident as this
fellow. I chose this photograph for the evidence, but if you get used to seeing this,
youll be able to see it in people. Thats the upper spiral line.

And heres the lower spiral line. You see this kind of jump rope. It goes around from
the iliotibial band and the tensor fasciae latae on the bottom. Thats on the front of
the hip, actually. It starts from the tensor fasciae latae up at the top there, the
purple muscle going into the blue anterior part of the iliotibial tract or iliotibial band.
And then that crosses the knee on to the tibialis anterior (the muscle, if you put
your hand over your knee, the tips of your fingers would be resting on your shin
bone and right next to it, the tibialis anterior muscle), and that goes down to the
inside of your foot and under the arch to join with the peroneus longus or fibularis
longus that we talked about before. So this muscle is in both the lateral line and the
spiral line. And you see the sling under the arch here. So its this sling under the
arch that I want you to pay attention to, because the tibialis anterior, if you look at
it, is going to be pulling up on the inner arch, and peroneus longus pulling down on
the inner arch. So they have this reciprocal sling-like arrangement on the inner arch.
And therefore, the balance of your arches is going to be certainly dependent on the
condition of your plantar fascia, certainly dependent on the condition of the bones
of the foot, but also dependent on the balance of the tension coming down from the
muscles in your calf. And therefore, yoga is really, really valuable in maintaining the
arches because of the balanced tonus that is put through these sets of muscles.
So here you can see the sling from the back, in a cut away with the tibialis anterior
and the peroneus longus, making that sling under the arch and controlling inversion
and eversion of the foot, controlling pointing the palm of the foot towards the other
foot and pointing the palm of the foot, the plantar surface of the foot, away from
the other foot. That inversion and eversion is controlled in part, in the main really,
by this sling that goes under. So that sling, if we took it on the other side, if we kept
going around, wed see that peroneus longus, the muscle in purple towards the
bottom, going down. We talked about it before going behind the ankle and
supporting the lateral arch. And this time, on the spiral line, it takes the track of
going to the hamstring, the biceps femoris, the outside hamstring. And that
hamstring takes it right up to the ischium, and then the back muscles take the line,
continue the line up from the ischium all the way up to the skull. So you see this
spiral line. Again, this is what we call the right spiral line because it has to do with
the right hip and the right side of the head and the right arch. But its going to
sweep around the left shoulder, the left side of the ribs, and then back over to the
right. I do not expect you to understand it especially if youre a neophyte to
anatomy, to understand all the anatomical relationships here. Im urging you,
however, because if you see it, you can then look and see it in your students, as
well.

These back muscles are really complex and very, very strong and capable of making
a rotation themselves in the spine. And as I said earlier, most everybody does have
a rotation in the spine, a preference to one side or the other. And in those with
scoliosis, several have different parts of the spine.
I said this before but here it is again. Every time you do a rotation, rotational pose,
or even the rotations of running, youre taking one spiral line and shortening it and
taking the other one and lengthening it. So that reciprocal, back and forth, one
side lengthens the other side shortens is very much characteristic of our movement
that cycles back and forth like a watch spring.
And this is going to be, Im sorry, the only thing that well be doing on the shoulders
and arms. Obviously, they do a lot of rotation, as well, the poses that were talking
about here. But were not going to really explore the arms in this two-hour series.
We are going to, instead, pay attention to the spinal twists. Again, Im sorry that I
dont know all the names to this. I just want to speak as an anatomist to some of
these.
Some people were asking, I think, about scoliosis, and Ill be speaking about it
anyway. Everybody has a rotation. Ive been in this business for forty years. Ive
never seen anybody with a perfectly balanced spine in terms of right and left, who
doesnt have a little bit of a bend to one side or other somewhere in their spine, and
absolutely doesnt have a rotation.
Now, this person had a very serious spinal rotation. So at some point, a rotation
becomes serious enough so that you call it scoliosis. There are various ways of
going about fixing this, and unfortunately, your medical system has chosen the least
conservative and the most heroic when things get really bad. I really wish that more
yoga folks had access to children with scoliosis because its been my experience that
you can (with a bit of knowledge, a bit of patience, and a bit of empathy) can really
do a lot with childhood scoliosis. But we sometimes dont notice it, dont assess for
it, dont catch it until the child is well into the teenage years, sometimes you dont
see it until the teenage years because everybody grows so fast that that brings it
out.
I dont want to blame anybody with this but it would be much better if we assessed
the kids for this at six and seven where its almost always evident if its going to be
a teenage scoliosis. And if you see that, you can do things like yoga, like specific PT
exercises to correct this problem before it becomes one that requires a heroic
intervention to stop it. Those for whom there are various conditions that make

scoliosis, some of them are not reparable in those kinds of ways. For those people,
the operation is a lifesaver because if your spine is collapsing it will affect all kinds
of things like your nerves and your organs. I mean, how did this person get to
adulthood? Imagine the heart and the lungs inside of the spine. Its a tragedy when
this kind of thing happens. But I only put the picture up there because everybody
has a bit of a rotation of one kind or another. So learning to be able to recognize
those rotations, some of which you can do from the front of the class, some of
which youre going to have to go and stand over your student because when youre
looking down at the spine from the top, then you can see the twist much, much
more easily than you can if youre standing in the front of the class. You can see
differences in twists. You can see aberrations, if you want to call them that, in the
compensations in the twists, and that can be really helpful in getting them out.
This is the kind of twist, I think a yoga teacher would argue, my yoga teacher would
argue with me, about getting her right sits bone down. But I did choose this
because she really keeps her spine centered over herself as she goes up into that
twist. The two things that I would love to say about twists in terms of anatomy is
stay centered (well be looking at a few people who arent so centered) and twist
into length. When you take a dish towel and you got it full of water and you start to
wring it out, the way you wring it out is to twist it. And if you twist it several times,
youll feel it gets shorter. Take any piece of cloth and twist it and it will get shorter.
So the tendency of our body when we use these spiral lines and the inner muscles
to make a twist, is that we can twist and compress as we make that twist, or we
can use the countervailing muscles properly, and if we do so, then youre using both
sides as you twist, and you twist into length. Twisting into length is a great thing for
the spine. Twisting into compression, not so good. So keep your spine centered
over its base of support, and so on the pose, of course, what the base of support is
when youre doing the twist, and twist into length, so the spine gets longer, the
head gets farther away from the bum as you go into the twist.
Lovely smile but an off-center spinal twist. I would question whether shes doing as
much in this pose as she could. How would you cue that? Would you push off her
right hand? But if she does that, she wont activate the muscles that she really
needs to. The tight muscles are in the deep part of the bum, in the deep lateral
rotators. So she needs to strengthen the psoas and the hip flexors and the belly
muscles to get up on top of the pelvis for that pose to work harder for her. Doing
the twist when youre off-center has decidedly less value. If you look at the folds in
her shirt, thats probably indicating a round back, a round T11 or T12. Shes really
collapsing and not having that part of the spine supported by her musculature.

If shes doing that, shes cruising for a spinal injury. Ive been doing this for forty
years. Let me gently wag my fingers at you. I have sent my daughter to college on
yoga injuries from people going into classes and working too hard or working not
with proper biomechanics and the proper positions. Im not coming after you. Yoga
does a whole lot of good. But the better informed yoga teachers are of the positions
that their students could get them into that could get them in trouble, the better off
it will be. And its a highly individual thing. All kinds of sports have injuries, but the
more we can do to keep those injuries down, the better.
So here is another gentleman. As with the black and white pictures of the neophyte,
the middling student, and the teacher that we looked at a while ago; you can see
that in this twist, he is so substantially shortening his left lateral line and elongating
the right one because his spine is going off-center. Its not staying over his base of
support. So hes working harder than he should. He is probably over-stretching
some stuff and under-stretching some others, and were I his teacher (which Im
not), I would urge him to get up on top of his sits bones even if his twist was only a
few degrees. You know, hes trying to get around so that he can look around behind
and get his hand around behind himself and grasp that knee or whatever the next
piece is of the pose. But hes not, in my opinion, doing the pose. So that reaching
around of the hand is all sort of, what the Alexander people call end-gaining, trying
to get too hard to the end and not paying enough attention to the process along the
way. Am I straying out of my anatomical realm? Probably.
So heres a woman with a similar problem, the inability to twist right around the
lower ribs where all those folds are under the bra line from the fifth rib on down.
Even though theres folds in the clothes, there arent folds in her at that stage so
that shes finding it hard to do the pose and therefore one of her lateral lines is
really short and the other one really long. Its worthwhile to look at your students
from the front and the back to see whether the twist is being done the same way in
both sides. Because if we were to watch this woman do the twist on the other side,
she might twist much more easily in those ribs to the other way. People dont do
the twists the same way right and left. This is something to really look at. Maybe
pick one student each week or something like that where you really look carefully at
how theyre doing it.
The second thing, and I dont have any pictures of these yoga poses from above,
but if you go and stand right behind your client, you can do something like put your
hands on their shoulders gently so they dont feel that youre looming over them,
and look straight down their spine. If you were standing right above that red

bandana and you were looking down her spine, you would be able to see where its
twisting and where it isnt and where the bend is happening in that spine. I really,
really urge you to look from above because its so revealing in terms of whats
happening in the rotation.
If youre asking me, What am I looking for? I would say, Well, look down fifty
backs and then ask me again. It really is not so much that, Oh, if this, then this,
or, Im looking for this so then I know this. It is much more if you look at fifty
backs, the fifty-first back, youll be much more informed, because youll have looked
at so many others. So many of these things, it matters less what you do, and it
matters that you do it consistently with lots of students in a row.
I know a lot of yoga teachers have this already. You pay attention to feet for six
months and youre really focused on feet and everybody getting the right foot
position. And then you get focused on the pelvic position or pelvic neutral or
shoulder mobility or. Its really good to have those enthusiasms. I guess I want to
say that the spine is one thats really worthwhile looking at, and looking straight
down it is a good idea.
In this woman, the superficial front line is pulled down, and were she able to
release that front line a bit, its particularly in the upper abdominals that shes short
so its pulling her head forward, its making her shoulders work harder than they
need to, shes not quite up on top of her hips. So in this case, though, I would really
concentrate on back bends. Back bends particularly maybe just even over a bolster,
something really simple to help her get the breathing into her lower ribs, get those
lower ribs moving, get that superficial front line to arise a little bit. That will release
her head. It will release her shoulders and will probably, although she may have to
do some further work in the deep lateral rotators, probably help to get her up on
top of her pelvis, as well.
The other thing that happens, and I dont know if this one is doing this deliberately
in the pose, but getting pulled down in the superficial back line. This woman is
pulled down in the back line. The back of her head is pulled down into her neck,
and the ribs are pulled down into the pelvis along the back. I would work with this
woman in forward bends before I would really want to see her doing more twists or
straining herself in the twists, at least until the back line lets go, she wont be
having so much fun in the pose.
If you can get those twists evened out, you can turn your rotation into something
that is really, really healthy for the body, really lengthening, and really brings the
whole spine into release in your inner sense thing .

Alright, Im sorry, everyone. I went over a little bit. Im still happy to answer a few
questions. Ill turn it over to Eva.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Thank you, Tom. That was wonderful. Very enlightening. And
as you can imagine, we have a ton of questions and all very, very interesting and
good questions. So I will dive straight in.
One question thats come in relates to, How does one differentiate between
tightness of fascia, etc., and compression due to anatomical structure? I think that
she is referring to Paul Grilleys work that says that the shape and the positioning of
the bones can be the limiting factor versus a body that needs to open up through
the lines of fascia.
Tom Myers: You really have three layers here, and theyre all structural. When you
say structural, what you then explained was the skeletal or articular. But your fascia
is part of your structure so when you reach a fascial limitation, you reach the
structural limitation, but not necessarily a skeletal one. And the middle layer is
ligaments. So lets just take Warrior I, a lunge kind of pose, where your pelvis is
faced forward and your leg is behind you and youre going down towards a lunge
type of position. When you first do that, youll probably get a lot of progress in your
early lessons, in your early classes. And then youll reach a point where you wont
be getting so much. At that point, you are much closer to having to stretch the
ligaments. Youve gotten some stretch out of the belly of the muscle. But now the
ligament, which is a much tougher structure, much more closely-knit fascial
structure than the muscle, and it will take more time for it to open up but it will
open up. I chose that lunge in the hip because you dont usually have, unless youre
talking about somebody whos very old or very arthritic or something who has spurs
on the joints, but for most young people, the hip is not limited by the structure of
the bone but by the ligament. Grilleys work on the acromion of the shoulder is
really good. There are some people who simply cannot, without damage, put their
hands together over their head and have the shoulder be connected to the back
because of the shape of the shoulder. On the other hand, there are a lot of people
who really are not structurally unable to do it, but are being fascially held or held in
the ligaments.
So the way that you can tell the difference between those (which was the original
question), is what we call in the body work field as end feel. Now, if youre
allowed to touch your clients, if somebodys saying, Oh, I really feel as if this
movement is just stopping and I cant do it, or, I feel like I shouldnt do it, or,
its hurting to do it If you take them and you move them towards the end-range

nice and slow, no damage. And when you get to that end-range, just test it a little
bit by passively stretching them into this. Youll get the end feel of the motion. And
the end feel of fascia has a more elastic feel and a myofascia (which is the muscle
and the fascia together) will have a softer end feel. Ligamentous will have a little
more of a clunky stop end feel. But bones will have a definite stop, like a door
closing, you know, coming into the door jamb. If you are reaching that kind of
thing, that is a structural limitation, and thats better to let it be the way it is.
In a very young (and Im talking about under twenty-two when the ischial plates,
before the bones have grown their full length), those people you can actually even
think about changing the shape of the bone by the work that youre doing but you
still want to be very gentle. And it takes time to reform the bones. Realize it takes
eight weeks to reform a bone thats been broken, so youre talking about many
weeks or months to allow the bone to change. But thats a process that works best
in the very young, and works less good in the less young, and in my age, I wouldnt
count on my bones changing at all because theyve lost some of the elasticity they
had when they were younger. I hope that answers the question.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Yes. Wonderful. We have a whole lot of questions pertaining to
how to work to reshape fascia. So Ill dive straight into those. Shirley is asking, For
someone with a lot of restrictions on the lateral line as we saw on the various
Triangle Poses especially around the hip, what is the best way to start creating
length rather than doing the postures incorrectly as we saw in the examples?
Tom Myers: Well, Im going to step outside of the realm of the yoga teacher
because you guys would know internally what that would be in terms of the specific
asanas. But for myself, I would say that putting a heavy stretch on the AB ductors.
If you put your hands on your waist and you go just below the bone of your hip,
thats where the abductors are. And if you go a little further down, youll feel the
trochanter of the femur sticking out to the side there. The abductors are in that
short little space. The iliotibial track is a fascial sheet that you can feel all the way
down the outside of your leg to your knee. But its those little muscles up at the top
of that, right by your hip. And putting a heavy stretch on those doesnt really
encourage them to lengthen. They tend to really, really grab in that. So I think (am
I gonna be killed for this?) that something like belly dance or hula or some African
dance where you move the hips separately from the femurs is a better preparation
for them opening that side of the hip in a Triangle Pose or any of those sidebending poses than is just doing the Triangle Pose. Or dont go fully into the pose.
Dont take your upper body as far into the pose. Go ahead and let your hand rest on
your thigh or your knee, somewhere where its very easy. And then, do some

motion with the hips, taking them to the left and to the right, you know, sideways
and rotation and mobilize those muscles before you then land a heavy weight
because your upper body is enough of a heavy weight to excite the muscles on the
outside of the leg to clamp down. And when they clamp down, they dont let go
easily. So I think a different kind of movement is a good preparation. I hope I
havent offended anybody by saying so.
Eva Norlyk Smith: I think one thing we have noticed in our practice is that if you
stretch the fascia in many different directions by doing small micro-movements, you
can get a lot more motion than if you just stretched the fascia in one plane. It just
grips if you stretch in one plane but if you do a little micro-movement and get sort
of a holistic sheer effect on the fascia, it will move a lot more.
Tom Myers: This does count to the question of obsession. Some people get into
sports or yoga and they get obsessional about it and end up going too far. You
know, wanting to look as good as they can in the pose, going as far into the pose
as they can. And for my own self when I do yoga, I am the worst person in the
class because I want to leave myself room for those micro-movements. I dont want
to go that far into the pose that I cant any longer adjust myself and move in the
pose. So yeah, my Triangle Pose, my hand is on my thigh or on my knee or
something because Im then able to move back and forth. And then once that I feel
that Ive really got the motion going, then I will dive more into the stretch.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Gayle is asking, What is the most neurologically appropriate
way and duration (seconds or minutes) to stretch fascia?
Tom Myers: That relates to the neurology of the muscle, and there are arguments
for all the different kinds of yoga. All of them work in a different way but they all
work physiologically as far as Im concerned. When you go into Iyengar Yoga or I
guess whats now being called Hatha Yoga, held yoga, where youre holding the
pose for a goodly amount of time, (and I think the muscles we were just discussing
on the outside of the hip are the exceptions to these) but most muscles, when you
put a stretch on them, especially if that stretch arises quickly, the first thing that
theyre going to do is to contract that muscle. The muscle spindles are stretched,
they respond by clamping down on that muscle. And the amount of time that that
muscle is clamping down is the time in which the fascia is not being stretched. So
you have this period of time between the time you go into the stretch and the time
that the muscles let go in the stretch. Of course, they dont completely let go, but
they relax with myotatic reflex, the stretch reflex that they have of contracting.
They let it go.

Somebody whos just beginning, that might take forty-five seconds, a minute, a
minute and a half. It really depends on the person. And theres this Aah and they
let go into the pose. And what that is, is the stretch reflex letting go, and at that
point, you really start stretching the fascia. You were putting some stretch on the
fascia before, but mostly it was being taken up by the contraction of the muscle.
When the muscle relaxes, then you start putting the fascia into a stretch. And its
not a stretch of an elastic band. Its the stretch of a plastic bag. So if I have a
carrier bag here and I put that stretch on, then the fascia begins to plastically
stretch to get longer. Its different in different parts of the body and its different
with different people. You know, somebody whos been doing yoga for a long time,
a yoga adept, can come in, go into the pose, and achieve that relaxation within
seconds. The pose is starting to do them more good in terms of the fascia as soon
as they have that relaxation. As you get more into it, you get the tone of the fascia
and the muscle to be even. Thats even better in terms of stability and balance. But
theres no particular amount of time.
Then if you went the other way, the Ashtanga idea, continuous movement is really
good for stimulating the nervous system, the kinesthetic system, the system that
tells you where you are, the part of your nervous system that tells you where you
are, the part of your nervous system that extends down into your body. Of course,
youre building balance, and of course, in more athletic forms, youre building
muscular strength and balance strength. So theres arguments for every kind of
yoga in my opinion. But if youre talking about how long to hold the pose, well, how
long until you relax is what I would ask.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Great. Theres a trick question for you. Debbie was asking, In
your experience, does fascial change occur more rapidly and effectively via yoga or
body work?
Tom Myers: I think that each has strengths. I think the people are going to body
work for things that they might better take to in yoga. When youre talking about
therapeutic yoga or privates or that kind of thing, then youre using yoga to do
much the same kind of thing. Ida Rolf started out doing exactly that, doing a kind of
yoga therapy, and over the years, she modified it by her studies on osteopathy and
Alexander and other things came into it, and it developed into a manipulative form.
But it started out to try to give the yogic experience to people.
In my experience, I refer out to yoga teachers a lot because there are things that
yoga will do that, even if I could do it in my practice, it would take me a long time
and it would charge the person a lot of money in the course of doing it. On the

other hand, if there are things that are beyond the scope of the yoga practitioner,
then you need to refer back to somebody and I think body workers are great people
to refer to in terms of getting something specific (getting that rib to go back in,
getting that side to open and breathe). You can reach places with your hands that
you cant reach with yoga. Ive had arguments about that with yoga teachers, but I
really do think its true. You can reach things with your hands that you cant reach
with yoga. You can do a lot of things with yoga, a lot more inexpensively as well,
that you cant do with body work.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Great. Last two questions here. Tammy is asking, How else
can yoga get to issues with the hamstrings by focusing on not just the hamstrings
but on the whole back line?
Tom Myers: Thats where I would urge you to look at the whole back line. Because
were short of time here, let me just pick two places. The hamstrings are on the
superficial back line so that goes all the way from the plantar fascia all the way
around to the top of the eye. People have such trouble with the hamstrings and
sometimes its the hamstrings and sometimes its actually the sciatic nerve thats
being stretched that goes through the hamstrings. So be easy on those hamstrings.
If I have hamstrings that are being very stubborn on me, I usually go somewhere
else rather than hammering on the poor old hamstring. Two places that you can go
one is the plantar fascia, the old trick of taking a golf ball or tennis ball depending
on the state of the persons foot, or one of the Yamuna balls or any of those small
things, and going under the foot and very slowly, not going vigorously backward
and forward on the foot but slowly going into one point after another between the
front of the heel and the base of the toes. If you do that for a few minutes and then
have them do a forward bend again, youll see that one side is going down
significantly more than the others. So you can affect the hamstrings via the plantar
fascia.
You can affect the hamstrings via right under the skull. If you put your thumbs
behind your skull and sort of wiggle your thumbs down under your skull so youre in
the muscles of your neck kind of coming up against the bottom of your skull with
your thumbs, if you now wiggle your eyes around, you will feel that those muscles
change tone. Those muscles are hard-wired to your eyes above and theyre hardwired to your spine below. And theyre just the control center of the superficial back
line. I sometimes find I get more help from the hamstrings by doing a suboccipital
release than I do from doing work on the hamstrings. So those are the two places
that I would look elsewhere to get some help for the hamstrings.

Eva Norlyk Smith: Fascinating. Okay, last question. Tammy again says, Weve
had our bodies our whole lives yet we dont know them. So if your keen eye sees a
shortened waist, how can a person become more aware of these patterns in their
own bodies through a yoga practice? So how can we help students become more
aware of their own patterns and work with them?
Tom Myers: Thats the question, isnt it? I think its really, really, really helpful to
be able to give people cuing with your hand. Now I dont know how that sits with
the yoga teachers being able to touch or scope of practice issues. But if you want
somebodys ribcage to come away from their hips, there are two things that could
be in the way, right. They could have some organic problem that would be making
that very difficult, or they could be so old that trying to make that happen, you
should just try to get more movement between the ribs and the hips. But if youre
talking of somebody whos fifty to sixty or older. Im hedging because people are
different biologically just in their chronological age. Im sixty-three in chronological
age but I dont feel that. I know a lot of people my age who are a lot less mobile
than I am, maybe because they grew up and I never did.
If you want to get that ribcage to go away from the pelvis, you put your hands on
the ribs. If you do that standing, you hold the ribs and they move the pelvis away
from the ribs. By doing something unusual like that instead of trying to lift the ribs
off the pelvis, drop the pelvis away from the ribs. That change of idea can be really
helpful to someone in getting back the kinesthesia because those things have to
stretch out. You can do those in the asanas. But if people dont know about
something, they cant stretch it. If they cant feel it, they cant strengthen it. If they
cant feel it, they cant stretch it. The trouble is that we often feel the stretch and
we go, Oh, boy. I really feel the stretch in my low back. Well, its actually the low
back, thats where youre feeling the stretch because someplace else is not
stretching.
Thats why you need a yoga teacher. Thats why you need a body worker. Thats
why you need somebody come in from the outside, because were all blind to what
were blind to. And thats true in kinesthesia and in your body, as well. So the
asanas help bring kinesthesia back to people to their sense of space, their sense of
their body. But if they are persistently not doing something like taking the ribcage
away from the pelvis, then putting your hands on there can really help, calling their
verbal attention to it can help. But its nothing like the hands, because you can give
the experience by say, It would feel like this if your ribcage moved away from your
pelvis. It would feel like this if your pelvis moved away from your ribcage. And
maybe they can then translate that on to the mat.

But were living in a society thats full of sensory-motor amnesia. Were in a society
where people are rapidly forgetting their bodies. I really feel badly about that when
I see that happening in children, but its happening to children all over the place.
Its happening in the electronic world. People really need to get back into their
bodies and I think both hands and yoga are really good tools to do exactly that.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Well, Tom, thank you so much. I just, for the record, I want to
say should you choose so, I think you would have a great career as a yoga teacher,
as well.
Tom Myers: Well, if yoga means union, Ill go for that. But in terms of my
knowledge of the asanas and how they proceed, I just stand in awe of the yoga
teachers that I see and have worked with over the years who construct classes of
great intricacy and, you know, real delicacy. Its fun to watch.
Eva Norlyk Smith: There are some very talented people out there. Tom, thank
you again. This was a wonderful presentation, and thanks for sharing all your
visionary insights. Its wonderful to get this new perspective and just kind of hear
you formulate what I think a lot of people intuitively sense in their own practice. So
thanks again, and we hope to welcome you back to many more courses on Yoga U.
Tom Myers: Well, if people have ideas of what they would like us to do from here,
they should send them in.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Yes, everyone, submit any suggestions. So everyone, thank
you so much for joining us. We look forward to catching you on the next course on
Yoga U. And Tom, again, thank you so much for sharing all your rich knowledge.
Tom Myers: Youre welcome. Good night.
Eva Norlyk Smith: Good night, everyone. Take care.